Researchers Announce Breakthrough in Flood Prediction Software

Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and IBM say new analytics software will be of use to city planners and emergency responders.

Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and IBM say they have developed new analytics software that can accurately predict flooding days ahead of a weather event.

“IBM's new flood prediction technology can simulate tens of thousands of river branches at a time and could scale further to predict the behavior of millions of branches simultaneously,” an announcement from the company proclaimed Wednesday, Aug 24.

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The analytics software will be of use to city planners and emergency responders, the researchers said.

"Unlike previous methods, the IBM approach scales-up for massive networks and has the potential to simulate millions of river miles at once,” said Ben Hodges, associate professor at the UT Austin Center for Research in Water Resources, in a statement from IBM. “With the use of river sensors integrated into Web-based information systems, we can take this model even further."

Video: IBM briefly explains the new software’s capabilities and applications.